(The following is abridged and adapted and modified from Stephen R. Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change”)

Between stimulus and response, human beings have the freedom to choose—but only if—if—we develop and exercise the four uniquely human endowments that make the freedom to choose possible. And these four uniquely human endowments are:

3. A Conscience—a deep inner awareness of right and wrong, of the universal life principles that ought to govern our behavior, and a sense of the degree to which our thoughts and actions are in harmony or disharmony with them. Having a conscience also means that we are able to look at situations fairly and objectively and neutralize and or account for our own biases.

4. An Independent Will –the ability to act based on self-awareness, conscience, imagination and forethought, and free of all other influences.

Even the most intelligent animals have none of these endowments. They are programmed by instinct and or training. But they can’t change their training or programming because they’re not even aware of it.

But because of our unique human endowments of self-awareness, imagination, forethought, a conscience, and an independent will, we can write new programs for ourselves totally apart from our instincts and training. This is why an animal’s capacity is relatively limited and a human being’s is much much less limited.

But—but—if we live like animals—meaning, if we live from our own instincts and unexamined conditioning and programming and out of our collective memory—we too will be limited.

The epiphenomenalism-determinism paradigm comes primarily from the study of animals—rats, monkeys, pigeons, dogs—and human beings who are neurotic and or psychotic. While this may meet the criteria of some researchers because it is measurable and predictable, the history of mankind as well as our own self-awareness tell us that this map doesn’t accurately describe the territory.

Our unique human endowments lift us above the animal world.

And it is the extent to which we exercise and develop these uniquely human endowments that determines how far we will elevate ourselves above the animal world and how well we will fulfill our uniquely human capabilities and potentials.

In discovering this basic principle of the nature of human beings, Viktor Frankl began detailing a very accurate self-map from which he then was able to lay out the first and most basic habit of highly effective people in any environment—the habit of proactivity.

The word proactive means more than merely taking initiative, it also means taking responsibility; it means that we as human beings are responsible for our own lives—our behaviors are a function of our decisions, not our conditions. It means that we can learn to subordinate feelings to values and principles and that we can learn to subordinate impulses and defer gratification for the sake of something more beneficial and meaningful down the road.

Look at the word responsibility. Response + ability—the ability to choose one’s response. Highly proactive people—meaning well-differentiated and emotionally mature people—recognize that capacity and responsibility. Reactive people—meaning poorly differentiated and emotionally immature people—reject or deny this capacity and routinely refuse to accept responsibility for themselves and their lives and their choices and instead blame circumstances, conditions, or their conditioning/upbringing for their behavior. Highly proactive people don’t—they do not blame circumstance, conditions, or their conditioning for their behavior. Rather, their behavior is a product of their own conscious choice, based on carefully thought-out values and principles, rather than a product of their feelings, based on their conditions.

Because we can, by nature, be proactive, if our lives are still a function of our conditioning and conditions, it is because we have, by conscious choice or by default, or because we are neurotic or psychotic, abdicated our capacity for responsibility and chosen to empower our conditioning and conditions and emotions and allowed those things to control us.

In doing so—in making such a choice, or in refusing to choose differently—we remain reactive and we continue not to emerge or lift ourselves from the animal kingdom.

Reactive people are excessively affected by their environment. If the weather is good, they feel good; if it isn’t, it affects their attitude and performance.

Proactive people, however, carry their own weather within themselves; they create their own inner weather. Whether it rains or shines outside makes little to no difference to them. They are value driven; and if their deepest value is to be a good and decent and productive person, it will not matter whether the weather outside is conducive to that or not.

“In the midst of winter, I found within myself an invincible summer.” – Albert Camus

“For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every day has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.” –George Gissing, from the chapter “Winter,” in “The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft,” 1903

Reactive people are also affected excessively by their social environment, by the “social weather.” When people treat them well, they feel well; when people don’t, they become defensive or protective or aggressive or hurtful. Reactive people build their emotional lives around the behavior of others, empowering the weaknesses and pathology of other people to control them.

“Hurt people hurt people.” – from the motion picture “Greenberg”

“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same. And if you lend to those from whom you expect to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners in order to receive back the same amount. Rather I say to you, love your enemies, do good to them, and lend expecting nothing in return.” – Luke 6:32-35a

The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of being a proactive person (as well as being a well-differentiated person). Reactive (poorly differentiated) people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment. Proactive people are driven by values—carefully thought about, selected, and internalized values—that are based on timeless principles. Proactive people are still influenced by external stimuli, whether physical, social, or psychological. But their responses to those stimuli are a value-based choice or response rather than a feeling-based response.

This way of looking at life and oneself can be very difficult to accept emotionally—a bitter pill to swallow—especially if we have years and years invested in explaining away our misery in the name of circumstance or someone else’s behavior. But doing so—learning to look at ourselves and our lives in this way, meaning as a function of our decisions and choices—is what allows us to truly grow and evolve as persons (differentiation) and to create a better and different future for ourselves. Because until a person can admit deeply and honestly that “I am who and what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” and accept that level of responsibility for oneself and one’s life, that person cannot truly say, “I choose otherwise.”

Holding people to the responsible and proactive course is not a demeaning or insensitive thing to do at all; to the contrary it is deeply affirming. Proactivity is a part of human nature, and the proactive musculature is there in each and every one of us, although in some of us it may be dormant. Thus by respecting and affirming the proactive, responsible, and forethoughtful nature of people, we are providing other with at least one clear, undistorted reflection from the social mirror.

Real love is not a reactive or merely emotional experience. Genuine love is a conscious conscience-driven activity based on a conscious decision to define ourselves (through our actions) consistently as a certain type of person and to orient ourselves towards another person in a very specific way, namely, as that of a genuinely Loving human being.

To be a genuinely loving human being and to genuinely love another means to put ourselves and our deeds and thoughts continually under the microscope and to continually scrutinize ourselves and our actions to see if they pass the test of being genuinely “Loving.”

To do this, we must have inner clarity—meaning our self-awareness and self-examination must be honest, which is to say, it must be directed by our conscience. If it isn’t—if our self-awareness is not directed by our conscience or our concern for what is true and objective and right—then our self-awareness will be subject to self-deception and spin. Our inner world and self-mirroring will be warped and distorted, subject to our narcissism, pride, and avoidance—avoidance of anything that might trigger us and make us feel ashamed, inferior, not good enough, et cetera. Which is what a working conscience is going to do—monitor us and call us out on our own bs—which may at times make us feel ashamed, guilty, not good enough, inferior, et cetera. And if we aren’t courageous enough, or if we aren’t interested enough in the truth and or growing up, then we may become very adept at ignoring our conscience, drowning out its still small voice, or refuting its observations in a myriad of illegitimate ways.

All of which will compromise our capacity to love others as well as ourselves.

A large part of genuinely loving another means intending to show up as our best to our relationship with another. And then actually do so. The same goes for loving ourselves. To love ourselves, we have to develop the sincere desire or intention to show up as our best to all facets of our life, to not settle for mediocrity or even just good enough from ourselves, but to push ourselves in a healthy (meaning non-perfectionistic) way to be our best or near-best in whatever we do and to make sure it’s something that is really important to us (that it passes the deathbed test).

Thus a big part of this type of love—practiced on ourselves or on another or others—requires that we subordinate some of our impulses, feelings, moods, and emotions to certain values and principles. All of which requires self-awareness, discernment, perspective, self-discipline, prioritizing, and focus, and that we keep our reactivity in check.

To the extent that we are reactive—driven by emotion and impulse, highly susceptible to being moody and to acting out on our moodiness, prone to give in to our wants and desires and preferences and limitations without much thinking or awareness or thought of consequences of doing so, and living life essentially unreflectively, meaning far removed from contemplating the existential and perennial questions in life, and then allowing the fruits of these contemplations to form and direct our behaviors and choices—we are not capable of actually loving another, let alone ourselves.

Our lives will be an exercise in capriciousness, randomness, in blowing whichever way the wind blows us. We will be the “falling leaves” that Hesse describes in “Siddhartha,” we will be what Frankl calls “a plaything of circumstance, we will be the epiphenomenalistic deterministic zeroes-in-an-empty box that Skinner and the Behaviorists described, we will be wild and wacky reflexes of the world, driven and determined by our surroundings and never have elevated ourselves above living like an animal.

Love is an act of will—meaning love is both an intention and an action. Love is as love does. When we love someone our love becomes demonstrable or real only through our exertion—through the fact that for someone or for ourself we take an extra step or walk an extra mile. Real love is not effortless. To the contrary, it is effortful.

That love is an act of will also implies that real love is a choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. No matter how much we may think we are loving, if we are in fact not acting lovingly, it is because we have chosen not to love. On the other hand, whenever we actually do stretch and exert ourselves in the cause of spiritual growth, it is because we have chosen to do so: the choice to love has been made.

Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional. The person who loves does so because of a decision to love. This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the feeling is present. If it is, so much the better; but if it isn’t, the commitment to love, the will to love, still stands and is still exercised and acted upon.

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality or ‘personhood.’ No one can become deeply aware of the very essence of another human being unless he deliberately chooses to love him or her. It is through the act of consciously loving another that a person is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, the person sees that which is potential in the other, that which is not yet actualized but still ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and what he should become, he helps make these potentialities come true.” – Viktor Frankl, very slightly modified from “Man’s Search for Meaning,” pg. 134

Advertisements

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About John

I am a married, 46-year old, Midwesterner, with four children. My primary interest is in leading a very examined and decent and Loving life; my interests that are related to this and that feed into this include (and are not limited to) -- psychology, philosophy, poetry, critical thinking, photography, soccer, tennis, chess, bridge.

7 Responses to Only Proactive People Can Genuinely Love Others, Reactive People Can’t

Thought I might contribute this “If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies… It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.” – Albert Einstein

Thank you for reading and for the comment. And, yes, 1 John, chapter 4, does make this point — that if we know how to love, it is because He loved us first, and we are learning to Love as Jesus loved his disciples.